I'm working an an agricultural robotics startup and can confirm that if anything, it's challenging to find robotics use cases in specialty crops that have a large enough market to justify the R&D investment necessary to get the product working in the first place. Corn and soy add up to hundreds of billions of dollars of market value a year, while even a huge specialty crop like strawberries is ~1/100 of that. There's an argument to be made for building out a robotics platform in a crop with higher value per acre (i.e. a specialty crop), then moving to the larger markets (i.e. row crops), but the degree of specialization real world robotics requires is a counterpoint to that - making the jump is often nontrivial.

PS - if anyone reading this is a roboticist/mechanical engineer in the Bay Area and interested in working on something like this or even just talking more, let me know! My email is my username (at) stanford.edu

Right, for one thing, with automation, it's also reasonable to produce many smaller crops and make up for what you lose in individual crop volume with combined varietal volume.

Or, more likely, produce another, lesser-known fruit or vegetable and market the hell out of it.